From conspiracy theory to talking point to mass murder
The New York Times is shocked, shocked that white supremacy is animating the GOP. The Party of Trump has chucked its Southern Strategy for replacement theory. Tucker Carlson of Fox News is its biggest promoter. They are getting people killed:
In just the past year, Republican luminaries like Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and Georgia congressman, and Elise Stefanik, the center-right New York congresswoman turned Trump acolyte (and third-ranking House Republican), have echoed replacement theory. Appearing on Fox, Mr. Gingrich declared that leftists were attempting to “drown” out “classic Americans.”
In September, Ms. Stefanik released a campaign ad on Facebook claiming that Democrats were plotting “a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION” by granting “amnesty” to illegal immigrants, which her ad said would “overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” That same month, after the Anti-Defamation League, a civil rights group, called on Fox to fire Mr. Carlson, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, stood up both for the TV host and for replacement theory itself.
“@TuckerCarlson is CORRECT about Replacement Theory as he explains what is happening to America,” Mr. Gaetz wrote on Twitter. In a statement after the Buffalo shooting, Mr. Gaetz said that he had “never spoken of replacement theory in terms of race.”
One in three American adults now believe that an effort is underway “to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains,” according to an Associated Press poll released this month. The poll also found that people who mostly watched right-wing media outlets like Fox News, One American News Network and Newsmax were more likely to believe in replacement theory than those who watched CNN or MSNBC.
Mass shooters in Pittsburgh, in El Paso, and in Buffalo this weekend referenced replacement theory as inspiring their murders:
Three shootings, three different targets — but all linked by one sprawling, ever-mutating belief now commonly known as replacement theory. At the extremes of American life, replacement theory — the notion that Western elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to “replace” and disempower white Americans — has become an engine of racist terror, helping inspire a wave of mass shootings in recent years and fueling the 2017 right-wing rally in Charlottesville, Va., that erupted in violence.
But replacement theory, once confined to the digital fever swamps of Reddit message boards and semi-obscure white nationalist sites, has gone mainstream. In sometimes more muted forms, the fear it crystallizes — of a future America in which white people are no longer the numerical majority — has become a potent force in conservative media and politics, where the theory has been borrowed and remixed to attract audiences, retweets and small-dollar donations.
“[A]s the era of the white majority nears its end, a revanchist, racist right has treated the facts of demography as an occasion for a sweeping, violent moral panic,” writes Talia Lavin at Rolling Stone.
The pathetic irony is that while white people may have held the numerical majority in the U.S. for eternity in political terms, Republican-voting whites have not constituted a majority of the presidential vote in decades. Not since 1992 have conservative whites (including Ross Perot voters) topped 50% of the electorate. Their population share continues to decline. It was the election of a Black man in 2008 that set off the alarm bells on the white right. The fringiest went to guns.
The Buffalo shooter is no longer a lone wolf, Lavin explains. He’s a mainstream Republican.
Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming is the Republican fringe these days.
Mainstream Republicans are plotting revenge against their enemies, white and non-white, once they secure their one-party state.
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